


Where the World Divides

by Mizmak



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Declarations Of Love, First Kiss, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Soft Aziraphale (Good Omens), Soft Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24861916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizmak/pseuds/Mizmak
Summary: On a night filled with uncertainty, Crowley thinks about light and dark, and asks Aziraphale a heartfelt question in his search for common ground between them.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 104





	Where the World Divides

Crowley stood on the flat roof of the bookshop on a warm night near the end of August. He stood alone and empty-handed, the glass of wine he’d been drinking earlier left downstairs.

He listened to the voices drifting up from below, a scattering of humans weaving through the brightly lit streets, mingled with the sound of traffic rolling by, the occasional car horn, a few shouts for a taxi. 

_We saved you_ , he thought. _Silly blasted humans…idiots playing with fire, always on the brink of destruction. And we saved you, and you don’t even know how close you came to dying. Damned, ridiculous humans._

He loved the world. _Clever_ humans, making so many things that he enjoyed. He stood above them, in the shadows of a darkened rooftop, listening, and wondering. What had it all been _for?_

Crowley heard the creak of a door behind him, and footsteps, and the rustling of an angel walking towards him.

_Can you see me in the dark?_

“Hello, Angel,” he called from the far side of the shadows.

Aziraphale found his way over, stepping carefully between the vents. Always light, always easy to see in the night, that was the way of an angel. 

“You left your wine, my dear. Are you coming back down soon?”

_Was it merely a habit of centuries upon centuries, that oh-so-casual ‘my dear’? Did he even know he was saying it?_

“Soon.” Crowley looked up then, at a cloud-covered sky, dark gray with patches of black struggling to show through, and not a single star in view. 

“Warm night, at least.” Aziraphale moved in a little closer. 

“Mm-hm.” He wished that he could see the stars.

“But I turned the wireless on while you were up here. There should be rain shortly. You ought to come inside.”

Crowley looked at him, lips twitching into a soft smile of affection. “Listen to you. The _wireless_.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course. Sorry.”

_“Velocipede.”_

Aziraphale let out a little sigh. “Yes. I do know better. I suppose one shouldn’t try to hold on so hard to what is gone.”

Crowley swallowed. “Not gone, Angel. Just changed.”

He heard the faint rumbling of a storm in the distance. Oh, well. It was London…it was England…it was the world, where sunshine balanced rainfall, and where night balanced day.

It was the world, where Heaven balanced Hell, where goodness cancelled out evil, and where an angel counterbalanced a demon.

_Why?_ What had it all been _for?_ Why had they even bothered?

He didn’t have hold of the right question, somehow.

Crowley felt it was there, a fleeting presence in the recesses of his mind, lost in the shadows where he couldn’t quite grasp it. And if he could not find the right question, how would he ever know the answer?

Or was it simply so immense, like a world-encompassing aura, that he couldn’t see it up close—the unfathomable question: why _everything_ —that circled endlessly round itself, forever beyond his reach.

He looked at Aziraphale, standing there quietly before him, just waiting. He looked at his friend. 

An angel could sense love, while a demon could sense hatred.

In six thousand years, not once had he felt hate from Aziraphale, not for _him_ , not for his supposed hereditary enemy.

Not once.

An angel could nearly almost always tell when someone told the truth, and a demon could nearly almost always sense a falsehood.

_We have nothing in common_.

And on a bandstand, just a few days ago, he had heard such words, and knew them for what they were—a lie, all lies, torn from the heights of Heaven and cast forth from an angel who _was_ his friend, and had always been his friend, and who had not been in control of his heart in that moment.

He looked at Aziraphale, who stood on the rooftop in the night, waiting.

Balance. Contrast. Light and dark. Truth and lies.

Could anyone truly know the light without ever seeing darkness?

Could anyone know love who had never known hatred?

He had known hate in the bowels of Hell, and he had seen nothing but the dark there, for he did not belong there. He had wandered through Hell, remembering what love had felt like as an angel, and finding it nowhere within its holloways. He held on to the memory of angelic love, seeking it, yearning for its return. 

One wondrous day he was released from the darkness, allowed to roam the Earth, and when the light came into his life at last, the contrast had been so blinding that he nearly fled from its force.

Yet he stayed, hoping, and waiting for an answer to a question which he could not name.

On the rooftop, Crowley gazed up as the first raindrops fell. 

He wished that he could see the stars.

“Come inside,” Aziraphale said. He reached out to touch Crowley’s sleeve. “Please?”

The gentleness of his touch made Crowley shiver, in a good way, a trembling shiver that he did not mind at all. “Fine.”

He followed his angel across the roof, slowly, carefully, and then down the short flight of stairs to the upper level, oh so carefully, and on down the longer flight of steps to the main floor, each movement ever so deliberate. 

When they reached the back room where they had been drinking, Aziraphale took up the wine bottle, and raised his eyebrows. “More?”

Crowley shook his head. “I want to go for a drive.”

“Now? In the rain?”

“Yes.” He wanted to drive out of the city, as far and as fast as he could, until he could find a clear night sky. “Come with me.”

A roll of thunder boomed overhead. Rain lashed against the windowpanes. 

_Run away with me to the stars, Angel_. _You know the truth when you hear it_.

Aziraphale nodded. “I’ll get my coat.”

_Thank you_.

The wipers slashed madly across the windscreen as Crowley drove south, out of the city, through the storm. 

What was he looking for? He didn’t even know where he was going.

“The sky looks a little less stormy to the southwest,” Aziraphale said.

“All right.” He got off the dreaded M25, turning southwest onto the A3. The traffic lessened the farther he drew away from London.

It was long after midnight. He couldn’t see anything except the road and the rain, only a few other cars, and nothing else on this restless highway until they reached Guildford. Even there he saw very little as they skirted the city on the bypass. The skies stayed cloudy, so he drove on and on, not really caring where the road took him.

The rain lightened the further south he went. The silence in the car became more apparent after a time, and Crowley reached for the radio dial. “Music?” He smiled. “Perhaps some bebop?”

Aziraphale stayed his hand. “Why don’t you talk to me instead?”

Crowley returned his hand to the steering wheel. He drove on, but he kept silent. He passed town after town, and somewhere after Petersfield he turned west onto a smaller road, as the skies began to clear.

The rain soon stopped altogether, and he pulled the Bentley off the road onto a narrow lane, coming to a halt beside an empty field. The clouds had rolled on to the north.

He got out of the car and leaned against the door, gazing up at the stars. 

Aziraphale climbed out, and came round to stand close beside him.

Crowley had no idea where they were. He just knew that there were lights in the darkness above them.

“Strange,” he said, “how ordinary they look.”

Everything was ordinary—the world had returned to its pedestrian, mundane reality in the twinkling of an eye—or of a star.

“Early this morning,” Aziraphale spoke softly, “I walked down to the bakery, as usual, and picked up my favorite pastries. Everything looked as familiar as it ever had. I went back to the shop and fixed my tea, and sat at my desk as I always do, to eat my pastries, and to sip the tea, and it rather seemed as if the past few days had not been real at all. Almost as if Armageddon were nothing more than a very peculiar dream.”

_Not a dream…a nightmare that left him shattered and broken in a burning bookshop. Or maybe yes—a dream that restored his world, and had salvaged love from the ashes._

“Do you know,” Crowley said, “that I tried to talk to God? After—“ he paused. Were there any truths left untold? Possibly not, even if never spoken aloud. “After the bandstand. I asked God to show me the Great Plan.”

“And you didn’t receive an answer. You told me as much, and I didn’t hear you.”

_There aren’t any right people. There’s just God, moving in mysterious ways, and not talking to any of us_.

“Why?” Crowley looked up at the night sky. “I only ever asked questions.” And never got any answers, and maybe there never had been an answer to a question that forever eluded him, that circled endlessly round itself.

Aziraphale took his hand, and twined their fingers together. “What is it you want to know, my dear?”

A warm touch, against his cool skin. _I want to know why we spent six thousand years worrying about Heaven and Hell’s absurd rules, why we were told that angels and demons were enemies. Why did Heaven tell you we weren’t friends, when all along…not just at the end, but all along, it was only_ as friends _that we could save God’s creation?_

To which, he knew, there could never be an answer.

Angel…demon…light, dark—two different worlds. But weren’t the night and the day just two halves of one whole? 

He squeezed Aziraphale’s hand. “I want to know if we have anything in common after all. I want to know, when you say ‘my dear’, if you truly mean it.”

Perhaps the light and the dark were not so divided after all. Perhaps they could meet in the center, where the edges blurred into gray. Or was that too soft a place to dwell?

“Yes,” Aziraphale replied. “I do mean it, with all my heart. You are my dearest friend.”

_Ah_. So there was love, as he had searched for so long ago, and perhaps that was all, in the end, that really mattered. “That’s all I need to know.”

He pulled Aziraphale to him, into an embrace, and he felt strong arms wrap around him as he brushed his cheek against an angel’s cheek, and breathed in the scents of cocoa and cinnamon, and of morning mist.

And so there was love, and there was a softness to its edges, which he didn’t mind at all.

Crowley brushed his fingers through Aziraphale’s hair. “What have we been doing here, all this time?”

Aziraphale pulled away a little, and he smiled. “You were done with questions, remember?”

“Oh, right.” Old habits were hard to break. “Can’t help it. Sorry.”

“What _I_ am doing,” Aziraphale said, “is trying to tell you how much I love you.” And then he leaned in closer than close, and kissed him.

_And suddenly Oh,_ there _was an answer…._

An angel’s lips, Crowley thought, with the few brain cells left that were capable of working, taste sweet and feel soft and warm, and what was that glorious tingling sensation spreading out and upward and all the way through him…how, oh how did he not know there had been an answer, how did he not know he’d been seeking out the wrong question…not _Why_ …it had never been _Why_. 

The question was _Who_ —who did he love, and he loved an angel, and the question was _Where_ —where could he find love, and he found it in the light to his dark, and the question was _When_ —when did he find love, and he found it from the beginning, woven into the fabric of his world. He found it when an angel tested the waters of friendship, and he found it when the world divided into opposite sides yet somehow kept bringing those sides close together, and he found it when the black and white tones of the world shaded gradually, hazily into gray.

And he found it when an angel said _my dear_ , and kissed him again.

_Had he said “I love you” yet to the answer to all of his questions?_

He hadn’t. 

He did.

Crowley whispered _I love you_ into Aziraphale’s ear, in between one kiss and the next.

And then he heard the rumble of thunder far in the distance. 

“Storm coming,” he said.

“Better get going, then.” Aziraphale released his embrace, then brushed his lips lightly across Crowley’s forehead. He strode round to the passenger side and climbed in.

_Between the storms, they would find a safe haven_.

Crowley slid behind the wheel, closed his door, and started the engine. He turned the car back down the lane, and then onto the wider road, and he headed north towards London.

As he pulled onto the A3, he said, “I think we could do with a holiday, don’t you?” Even as he drove towards the city, Crowley felt a desire to drive away from it, too. 

“That sounds…well, _nice_.”

“You can say it now, Angel. I think I’ve gone soft.”

“Hm. Could be.”

“Let’s go back to the bookshop, and grab a few essentials—“

“Wine,” Aziraphale put in. “Your favorite sofa pillow—“

“Cocoa. Whatever book you’ve been reading. Some pastries from the bakery as soon as they open this morning. Then we’ll turn around and head back this way—somewhere quiet. Somewhere we’ve never been before.”

“Anywhere you like,” Aziraphale replied. “We can have as long a holiday as you want. Do whatever you like. Whatever _we_ like.”

Crowley drove on, outrunning the storm clouds that rolled across the sky in the distance, outpacing the thunder, and the lightning that tore through the night behind them.

He drove on, and the world felt different around him.

He drove on, and the world felt as if it had shifted, that everything balanced in new ways, that a question and an answer had settled into the fabric of his life.

Aziraphale sat quietly beside him, always light, but somehow tonight, a softer light, a little hazier around the edges, meeting his own hazy shadows in the space between.


End file.
